MARIE CLAIRE UWIMANA

Teacher who wove peace baskets and a cooperative of widows into Kigali's quiet strength

The first agaseke Marie Claire Uwimana wove after 1994 was a small, lopsided basket of sorghum straw and sisal, and she gave it away to the first woman who stopped at her door. She did not speak often of what the months of that year had taken from her, her husband and two of her brothers among them, but she wove, and she asked the women around her to weave with her, and that is how a whole cooperative began.

She was born in 1955 in Huye, then Butare, the second of six children of a primary-school headmaster. She trained as a teacher, married Innocent Nkurunziza in 1978, and taught Kinyarwanda and arithmetic for sixteen years. In 1995 she moved to Kigali with her three children, took a room in Gikondo and, in 1996, gathered fourteen women in a borrowed church hall to weave. They called themselves Twiyubake, 'let us rebuild ourselves'. By 2022 the cooperative had a hundred and forty members, a workshop of its own and orders from as far as Nairobi and London, and every weaver, Marie Claire insisted, learned to read, count and sign her own contracts.

She was patient, precise and funny, and could tell the quality of a basket by the sound it made when she tapped it. She ran the cooperative's books at her kitchen table, cooked beans and sweet potatoes for every visitor, and sang in the choir at Sainte-Famille Church for twenty-six years. She taught that sorrow shared over work becomes lighter, and she never missed a Saturday meeting.

Marie Claire died in Kigali in November 2022, aged sixty-seven, after a short illness. She leaves three children, six grandchildren and a hundred and forty weavers who keep her baskets alive.

“A basket is just a small peace that you weave with your own hands.”